The Skillute Cycle

Series · 4 books · 2011-2014

By S.P. Miskowski

Books in series

Knock Knock

2011

At the center of S.P. Miskowski's novel-length fairy tale are three restless girls, best friends stuck in the backwater of Skillute, Washington in the late 1960s. Their neighbors and families are petty or poor, or both. They warn the girls not to wander into the dense forest. Something evil lurks there, people say. The girls are not convinced. During a playful oath, they wander too far into the woods. Their mistake unleashes a malignant spirit that terrorizes Skillute for the next fifty years.

Delphine Dodd

2012

DELPHINE DODD is the first in a trio of novellas related to the novel KNOCK KNOCK. Before the town had a name, people buried their dead on the mountainside. Now Mont des Morts exists only in memory, but its ghosts still haunt Delphine's family.

Astoria

2013

In the aftermath of a shattering tragedy, Ethel Sanders flees her hometown of Skillute in search of a safe place where she can recuperate. She has discarded friends and family in a desperate bid for a new life, yet something is not right in the hideaway she's chosen. Strange images of the past pursue her, even in her dreams. Are they harbingers of the future, reminders of recent events, or her own, personal demons come to stake their final claim?

In the Light

2014

While fleeing from neighborhood bullies, a lonely girl uncovers a dark secret buried near the abandoned ruins of a house mired in local legend. Ruth hopes the charred remains that she unearths will bring a bit of magic to her life, but she's no match for the force that dwells in this place, waiting for a chance to live again. A displaced child neglected by affluent parents and a former preacher burdened by the tragic and scandalous circumstances of his mother's death face a final reckoning at the hands of a woman with the power to summon good and evil. In the Light is the final book of the Skillute Cycle, a chronicle of one fictional town and an abiding horror that lies just beneath the surface. In the woods. In the water. Beneath the ground. The time has arrived. Something evil has come home... (Cover art by Russell Dickerson)

Author

S.P. Miskowski

Author · 16 books

S.P. Miskowski is a recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. Her books have received four Shirley Jackson Award nominations and two Bram Stoker Award nominations, and are available from Omnium Gatherum Media and JournalStone/Trepidatio. Her second novel, I Wish I Was Like You, won This Is Horror Novel of the Year and a Charles Dexter Award. Miskowski's stories have been published in Supernatural Tales, Black Static, Identity Theory, Strange Aeons and Eyedolon Magazine, and in numerous anthologies including Haunted Nights, The Madness of Dr. Caligari, October Dreams 2, Darker Companions: Celebrating 50 Years of Ramsey Campbell, The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten and There Is No Death, There Are No Dead. She is represented by Danielle Svetcov at Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary Agency and by Anonymous Content (film/TV rights). Author site: https://spmiskowski.wordpress.com/